1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an electronic mail processing system, and more particularly, to an electronic mail processing system which encourages a recipient to open and reply to an electronic mail message delivered thereto.
2. Description of the Related Art
Electronic mail, or e-mail, is a personal communication tool that allows a person to send and receive messages over networks. Today, electronic mail delivery services are used in many network communities for the purpose of member-to-member communications via a local area network (LAN) or wider area networks such as the Internet. There are some network providers specialized in e-mail delivery services.
In certain types of e-mail delivery services, each user registers to the server topics that he/she is interested in, so that new information related to his/her interest is delivered to his/her mail box in the form of electronic mail. Assume here that one member of a certain special interest group has sent a message to the other members of the group. When the e-mail message reaches one's mail box, the recipient is notified by his/her computer of the arrival of the message. The recipient then runs a mailer application to open an e-mail message window, where he/she can see a message summary indicating who wrote the message, when it was posted, what the subject is, and whether it was read or remains unread. The recipient checks the sender's name and the subject line of the received e-mail message to determine whether it is worth reading or not, and if it looks interesting, the recipient will open the message to read the body text. Otherwise, the message may be disposed of or just left unread. Note that, from the standpoint of the message sender who transmitted the information with a specific intention, it may be of great concern whether or not his/her e-mail message is opened and read by the recipient, who is a registered member of the special interest group.
However, the recipient may not always read every message received. Rather, he/she can freely decide whether to open each incoming e-mail message, when, for example, it is a direct mail from a certain company. As such, while every sender sends e-mail, expecting all the recipients to open and read the message he/she has sent, recipients do not necessarily read all incoming messages. Since the system returns acknowledgment information to the sender, he/she can confirm whether or not the message was opened by the recipient as intended. However, even if the recipient did open the e-mail message, the sender has no way of knowing whether the recipient has really read the contents of the message until he/she receives a reply message from the recipient.